The Story of Money19 Nov 2025

What’s the deal with OpenAI's deals?

OpenAI is entering a new era. It's restructured to add a for-profit arm to its business and has signed more than a trillion dollars’ worth of deals to secure chips and build out data centres. But those huge financial commitments also raise massive questions: How will a heavily loss-making company fund $1.4tn worth of deals with some of the biggest publicly listed companies in the world? And what systemic risks could that come with? The FT's US west coast financial editor Tabby Kinder and venture capital correspondent George Hammond answer the questions everyone's asking.

The FT does not use generative AI to voice its podcasts.

Clips from Bg2 Pod, CNBC, Yahoo Finance

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

For further reading:

How OpenAI put itself at the centre of a $1tn network of deals

Who owns OpenAI? Blockbuster deals complicate investor payouts

OpenAI shunned advisers on $1.5tn of deals

How high are OpenAI’s compute costs? Possibly a lot higher than we thought

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Attend the FT Global Banking Summit, December 2-4 in London: Enter SAVE20 for a 20% discount, register here.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Follow Tabby Kinder (@Tabby_Kinder) and George Hammond (@GeorgeNHammond) on X or on Bluesky (@tabbykinder.bsky.social), (@georgehammond.bsky.social). Behind the Money host Michela Tindera is on X (@mtindera07) and Bluesky (@mtindera.ft.com), or follow her on LinkedIn for updates about the show and more.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(346)

How the US financed World War I using Charlie Chaplin and Girl Scouts

The first world war was one of the deadliest conflicts the world has ever seen. And when the US entered the war in 1917, it faced a massive financial challenge: how to pay for its contribution? Enter ...

7 Okt 40min

The bloody birth of the bond market

The US Treasury market - the world's largest government bond market - is worth about $32tn today, making it the largest pile of debt accumulated in history. But its roots lie in medieval Venice, a blo...

30 Sep 43min

Does history show that fraud is the sign of a healthy economy?

How do you tell if an economy is actually working? Most economics classes point to controlled inflation, steady growth, or low unemployment - but what if the level of financial fraud is the real hidde...

23 Sep 45min

Meet the Fuggers: Europe’s richest family ever

Long before Silicon Valley, the grandson of a 15th Century German peasant named Jakob Fugger built a mining and banking empire that dwarfed today’s tech titans, accumulating a fortune estimated at $4 ...

16 Sep 43min

Why Dante put bankers in hell and James Joyce didn't

Is money a tool of moral decay or a force for human liberation? Dante feared money would corrupt and damn us, placing bankers in the eighth circle of hell - just one above Lucifer. James Joyce saw it ...

12 Sep 41min

He expelled the money changers. So was Jesus anti-capitalist?

What did Jesus really think about money? When he overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple in Jerusalem, accusing them of turning a sacred "house of prayer" into a "den of robbers", he...

9 Sep 51min

1873: The year America ditched silver as money and all hell broke loose

In 1873, Ohio senator John Sherman quietly helped pass a law that stopped Americans from turning silver into official US money. The consequences were huge: years of economic pain and political turmoil...

2 Sep 41min

The ‘Sheriff of Wall Street’ who exposed bankers’ lies

He was the bruiser of Wall Street. In the early noughties, New York attorney-general Eliot Spitzer took it upon himself to expose the lies of stock analysts during the dotcom bubble. His crusade blind...

26 Aug 46min